[Vwoolf] O'pera O'Keeffe

[Michael Schrimper]

Dear All,



I’m writing in part because I know some of us have written about O’Keeffe,
but also because I much enjoyed a contemporary opera this weekend and
wanted to describe it and share.



The chamber opera, *Today It Rains*, was about the train journey Georgia
O’Keeffe took from New York to Santa Fe in 1929, putting physical distance
between herself and Stieglitz. Before the performance began, in a
refurbished warehouse type space in San Francisco’s Mission district, a
petite French woman, all in black, introduced herself as the conductor, and
she said that we as the audience should consider ourselves as passengers on
the train with O’Keeffe. (Her role as conductor, too, of an opera set upon
a train gives new dimension to that word, “conductor”). I thought that was
an interesting way to position us as audience members, and use this mass of
seated bodies as participants in the show….



It was a multimedia performance, so a film in the background showed images
of countryside as though we were all looking out the train windows crossing
the States. Somewhere outside Chicago, the mezzo portraying O’Keefe sat on
the top bunk of her bunk bed and sang an ode to her paint box, which became
a plea: “Please don’t abandon me. Help me see.” With the woman portraying
Rebecca Strand, there was a duet about being a “woman artist” in the
post-Freud art world: “A *woman* artist? What does that mean?” O’Keeffe and
Strand also sang a duet about the complexities of marriage. Stieglitz was
portrayed, too, with scenes of him lamenting O’Keeffe’s departure in their
New York apartment (the view from his window was one of O’Keeffe’s
paintings of New York, and on his walls he had her early charcoal
sketches).



The performance was elegantly and seamlessly divided among three parts:
Departure; Connection; Arrival. When we arrive in Santa Fe, the screen in
the background cuts to black. A rather foreboding ending. But then having
the historical distance, we think of all the color that was born from that
point, and imaginatively fill in the gaps with O’Keeffe’s bold images.



Overall the production was united by O’Keeffian imagery, and the romance
that is naturally evoked by a train journey across North America in 1929.
It has been a while since I’ve read O’Keeffe’s letters, which supposedly
informed much of the production, so I can’t say to what extent it was an
“accurate” portrayal, so to speak. But for anyone further interested:





https://operaparallele.org/today-it-rains-2/


Michael
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